What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  By his own sophomore year, Michael was head of Students for Stevenson, and he helped sign up a quarter of the campus for the ACLU mobilization against Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare hordes. These were serious endeavors at Swarthmore; the school’s Quaker-pacifist roots fed the free-speech, free-inquiry doctrines of the present. With the nation at war in Korea (Swarthmore voted not to host a ROTC corps), with an Army general heading for the White House, with loyalty oaths waving as weapons in the hands of the know-nothing right, the values of liberal education seemed to hang in the balance in 1952. But at Swarthmore, there was always the faith that intellect, knowledge, the Truth, would triumph, when spread by effort of the enlightened few. True, in Michael’s sophomore year, Stevenson was drubbed in the national vote by that general, Ike, the people’s choice. But one day in the spring of his junior year, the cafeteria was abuzz with the news that the Supreme Court had struck down segregated schools. (And wasn’t that Justice Black’s daughter, Jo Jo, eating lunch with her classmates over there?) There was no doubt that advancing enlightenment would solve the problems of race relations, just as surely as advancing medicine was finding a cure for polio, just as surely as urban renewal would cure the blight of city slums. ... And there was no doubt that these brainy, young Swarthmore savants would march in the forefront of Improvement. By the time Michael was a senior, spending a semester in Washington, D.C., he had the satisfaction, and confirmation, of seeing Joe McCarthy censured by the Senate. Truth and Knowledge were on the march.

  Now, there was less and less doubt in Michael’s mien, less hesitation in his talk. He participated in all issues of the day, large and small, but not in debate. He knew what he thought. If the question was, say, whether a communist should be allowed to speak at Swarthmore, others might resort to arguments from Jefferson or Rousseau ... not Michael. “What is this?” he’d snap. “It’s a campus. Of course he should speak.” End of argument. If someone in the dorm liked the Indians’ chances in the World Series, Michael had three reasons why the Giants were clearly superior. Cleveland would be destroyed. End of argument.

  There were lots of fellows in the Wharton dorm who thought they should end up in Washington: the capital, after all, was the locus of great doings, and the federal government was the engine of progress. ... Not Michael: he claimed it was state government that affected people’s lives, the State House was where the action was. Not for him some vague plan to climb the great greasy federal pole. He knew what he wanted, and he wasn’t afraid to say it:

  “I want to be Governor of Massachusetts.”

  In their fourth year in that hothouse (they used to say: at Swarthmore, you major in Swarthmore), most of his friends were planning, scheming, to see the world, to go somewhere far away and new—Europe ... or, at the very least, California. But there was no doubt where Michael was headed: he was going home. The only question, he told friends, was whether to head straight to Boston for law school, or get the Army out of the way. In the end, he decided it would disrupt his career less if he got through the Army first. So he made plans, in an orderly way, to sign on for a two-year hitch, right after college. Meanwhile, for holidays, and some weekends, he went ... back home to Brookline.

  Sometimes, he’d bring a friend along, and proudly show them his home. There they’d meet his imposing father, and Euterpe, who was the life and warmth at the table, explaining and proffering the strange Greek dishes, asking about their schoolwork. There, too, some of them met his big brother, The Duke (Michael was probably the last still to call him that), who was quiet, diffident, but obviously fond and proud of Michael.

  Stelian had made it out of the hospital, and after a hiatus of more than a year, back to Bates, where he made it to graduation. But he did not emerge with Michael’s confidence in his armor, or Michael’s determined route-of-march toward his chosen destination. In fact, somewhere along the line, Stelian lost track of destination.

  For a while, he lived and worked in a settlement house, doing social work in Boston’s poor South End. He didn’t want to live at home anymore. He wanted to make it on his own. The settlement house only paid a pittance, but it offered a room and communal meals, and there was the wonderful, WASPy director, a kindly woman named Beatrice Williams. Beatrice became like a mother to Stelian.

  In 1958, Stelian entered the Boston Marathon ... but he doubled over after sixteen miles and could not finish the race. In 1960, he ran for Brookline Town Committee, and won. But that was the year Michael and his friends took over the whole Town Committee.

  In later years, he had his own apartment, an efficiency near Coolidge Corner, in Brookline. And he had brief jobs as an assistant in the City Manager’s offices, in a couple of small towns around Boston. For several years, he taught government at Boston State College. The job never paid much. Stelian never could afford a bigger place, or a car: he rode his bicycle everywhere, sometimes thirty miles and back, to see an aunt or a cousin in Lowell, where the Dukakis clan had started out in America. But the subject matter of his classes was congenial: politics was still his abiding interest.

  He was always active on the fringe of Democratic politics in Brookline—always around, anyway. A few more times, he filed to run: for the Town Board of Selectmen, or the Massachusetts House. But he wasn’t well known, and often, not a comfortable presence. He was friendly, sometimes too friendly, somewhat odd. A few old friends tried to fix him up with dates, but he didn’t have much money for that, and he never did find a girl to share his life. He even stopped going home to Rangely Road for Sunday dinners, or holidays. He was, through the sixties, a solitary man, always with dreams of office, but never with much chance. Sometimes, he’d buttonhole a cousin, or someone he knew in the past, and urge them: “You’d be great in office. You run ... I’ll be your campaign manager.” But they never did, and nothing came of Stelian’s dreams. His final race, he ran as a Republican, for the House seat Michael vacated when he was on his way to his first run for Governor. But Stelian finished last in that vote. The way his old schoolmates described him, he was a shadowy figure, at the end.

  And the shadow was getting longer. A couple of times, Stelian was back in the hospital: now, it was drug therapy, instead of shock ... and endless talk with psychiatrists, about his family. And one night, in the sixties, something finally welled up in him and burst into the open. Michael’s volunteers were leafleting Brookline for Michael’s reelection to the House of Delegates. They were going door-to-door, leaving fliers in the boxes, and after they’d passed, Stelian came, and took out Michael’s literature and put in his own:

  Not Michael Dukakis ... STELIAN Dukakis ...

  No one was sure if Stelian was even running for an office. But that wasn’t the point:

  DO NOT VOTE FOR MY BROTHER ...

  MICHAEL DUKAKIS IS THE LAST MAN TO VOTE FOR ...

  I, STELIAN DUKAKIS, WILL RUN AGAINST HIM AND RID THIS DISTRICT ...

  Michael’s friends were horrified, for him, for the family. They called each other frantically all night: go down your street and get Stelian’s fliers out of every box!

  And they did. They got most of them. Stelian had only poked them into the slots of the mailboxes. He hadn’t stuffed them all the way in. For the most part, his leaflets of pain never saw the dawn. Their existence was only whispered.

  The following day, Kitty called her friend, Sandy—that same special woman who’d been Michael’s first girlfriend—but all she could say was, “Oh, God ... you don’t know what we’re going through here.” Michael never talked about that night. If someone, a close friend, asked about Stelian, Michael would literally hunch his shoulders, shake his head, sadly, and mutter: “We have to live with it ...” But that was all: the wall of silence remained.

  It wasn’t too long after that, just a few years ... a Saturday night ... a car—someone—hit Stelian as he pedaled his bicycle down Winchester Street, near his apartment, in Brookline. Stelian’s skull was smashed. The motorist drove away.

  Stelian lay in the hospital with
the membrane of his head exposed, still pulsing with life. But he never came out of the coma. Panos and Euterpe and Michael all came, and stood by the bed. Then, they sat. The parents came for months. Sometimes, one or the other would hold his hand and call to him, Stelianos! ... and think they felt something in his hand. But probably they did not. Stelian died four months after the accident, July 29, 1973.

  13

  1951

  THERE WAS NO MAN more equable, sweet-natured, than Carl Hartpence, who had a few things to blame the world for, if he had been so disposed. There was, for one, the pressure of money: the family finances were always a strain. But that did not alter Carl’s disposition, and the kids grew up without much thought that they were poorer than anyone else.

  One of Nina’s brothers, Neal Pritchard, was a prosperous man, owner of Ottawa’s finest grocery store. The family story was, Neal stocked the basement of his store with foods just before World War II ... and when the rationing hit, well, Neal had money. After the war, it was Carl who sold Neal a new Packard, and that helped out in Nina’s household. Anyway, if Neal’s son, Jon, got a new bike, Neal made sure that cousin Gary got one, too. Carl never seemed to mind that, just as he never seemed to chafe at abiding amid a gaggle of Pritchards, in general.

  It was with quiet resignation, too, that he accepted his status in Ottawa, Kansas, which was pretty much nil. Ottawa had four distinct social orders, which offered the advantage that three of the four had someone to look down on. Within the top stratum, there were the bankers and professional people and the high-muckety-mucks of Ottawa University. That was the country club set. Just below that was the Main Street crowd, the merchants, contractors, landlords, and other businessmen who formed the Chamber of Commerce. And then there was the general run of working people and farmers, into which third stratum Carl Hartpence was born, and in which he stayed. The only stratum below was peopled by blacks and Mexicans, who were talked about with disdain and mistrust by many people in town. But Carl never went in for that.

  In fact, you could go years and never hear Carl utter a harsh word about anyone. He’d try to find the good in whatever came. When his own leap for the next stratum foundered ... when he went into business with a cousin, trying to start an insurance agency ... when the cousin then left Carl high and dry, without means to keep his dream afloat ... Carl just went back to selling farm equipment, and all he said was: “Well, Jim had a different way a doin’ things. ... Jus’ couldn’t work it out.”

  Carl seemed oblivious to inequity. Which is what made it so remarkable, that Friday night, on Main Street, when Carl and Gary were sitting in Carl’s car, his old Chrysler, which he’d nosed into a parking place, diagonal to the curb, like folks did in those days—in Ottawa, anyway—just to take the evening air and watch the people go by. Carl was talking quietly, and just what brought it on is lost in time now. Maybe it was something Gary said, something with a shot of ambition behind it. Or something about the wider world and what a man might do in it. Anyway, the remarkable part was what Carl said when he half turned away from the windshield, toward his son, and tried to explain how the world was.

  He said, there are people with money in the world who can do pretty much what they want, and then there’s a lot of others. And the ones with most of the money keep the money, and do not care much about the others. The ones with the money, Carl explained, mostly live in New York, and do what they choose. The rest of us work, and get by.

  Of course, the way Carl was, he said it without rancor, just stating facts in his quiet way. Still, Gary never forgot it. It was the most political statement he had ever heard in his family.

  Politics wasn’t something you’d hear about in Ottawa, not the politics of social movements, certainly not at Ottawa High. It wasn’t till years after the Supreme Court decided that school case forty miles up the road, in Topeka, that Ottawa kids even heard the rumblings of protest, or civil rights, or free speech, or anything like that. In fact, when a few kids at Ottawa High finally did mount a tiny echo to the great movements abroad in the nation (they parked themselves in an upstairs hall one day, between classes, and called it a “sit-down”), Mr. Hood, the principal, marched by, clapped his hands twice and shouted, “All right! That’s it! Let’s get back to class!” ... and they were up and on their way before he got to the end of the hall.

  While Gary Hartpence was there, things hadn’t even gone that far. When he looked back much later, and tried to describe Ottawa High, he said it was like the television show Happy Days. Fact was, they weren’t all happy. There were strata in the high school, too—cliques, more like it—and Gary wasn’t in them. Everybody knew he was smart—a hell of a reader—but that and a quarter would buy an ice cream soda at the Dutch Maid.

  Jocks were the heroes, and he was not a jock. He had played football before high school, when one of the older kids organized an eighth-grade team, Gary was an end (he could catch, and, yes, he did get dirty) and he loved it. The coach, a high school player named Dick Martin, called him Harts, and Gary liked that. But after that, Gary didn’t have the speed, or size—by the middle of his high school years, he might have weighed one-fifty, maybe, with his clothes on. In fact, he stayed scrawny. And with those jug ears, and a complexion that wasn’t just right, well, he was no social lion, either.

  That was the other whippy thing to be. But in that ethic, the whippiest kids had to show a streak of wildness—nothing too awful (one farm kid did sock the principal in the jaw, but that was over the line)—maybe a sack of garbage strewn on somebody’s porch, or a sack of crap at their front door, or stuff nailed up on telephone poles, like wheelbarrows, or porch furniture. Wildness was getting your father’s car and driving the tires up onto the railroad tracks, around Third Street, or Fourth, and then riding the rails, with your fists frozen around the wheel and your face a bloodless grin of fear, out to Thirteenth Street, or even Fifteenth ... before you yanked the wheel and got back onto the street. (Larry Larkin and Richard Fogel, they’d do anything ... rode the track fifteen miles, out to Williamsburg!) Wildness was bushwhacking parkers while they petted behind their steamy car windows ... and other drive-in movie stuff. But wildness was not Hartpence—not at all.

  For one thing, he couldn’t go to the drive-in, or even to the Plaza Theater on Main Street. That was a Nazarene rule: no movies. Same with dancing at the youth center, which was open Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights (weekends, till eleven) and was a must on the high school social circuit. Sometimes, there were pyjama parties, and the girls would go out on the street, middle of the night, in their baby-doll pyjamas ... or they’d go skinny-dipping at the country club, while the boys hid in the bushes to watch. Not Gary. ... Kids would hide their cigarettes out at the quarry—then they’d get rained on and ruined, so the kids would crush up leaves and smoke the stuff from straws. Not Gary. Smoking was explicitly barred in the Godly Walk of the Nazarenes.

  But it wasn’t the church that set Gary apart. It was Gary. He was shy, and just ... didn’t belong. After a while, maybe he didn’t want to belong. He’d say he couldn’t understand why the rest of the kids acted like they did. Things most people just took for granted ... bothered him: Why did they have to be that way? Marvin Wilson was a heck of a nice guy, good athlete, smart, good-looking ... but Marvin was Negro, so he and his family had to sit in the back row of the Plaza Theater. Why?

  Friends would say: Gary, that’s just how it is. Who cares?

  “Well, why is it like that? I don’t understand why.”

  He couldn’t small-talk, the way most kids could, about dragging Main in Doug Shade’s car, or who was dancing (and with whom) when the youth center closed last night. ... He couldn’t see the point of that stuff, like the endless cycle of Hi! Howareya? in the halls at school.

  How you doin’?

  Fine.

  Hiya, Gary!

  Eight times a day, they’d say the same thing! “Why do we do these things? ...”

  At one point, he worked out his own answer:
>
  How are ya, Gary?

  “Well,” he’d say, “I feel much more like I do now than I did when I got up this morning.”

  His humor was a bit quiet for the crowd.

  Tell the truth, he probably would have loved it if his talk had been just the right talk, or Carl’s car had been just the right car, instead of the solid, family Chrysler sedan (with wheels so wide, you couldn’t even try to ride the rails). He always half admired (more than half!) the ease some guys had: his friend, Kent Granger, a good athlete, had a way with girls that was so natural. Another friend, Dick Martin, was so ornery as a kid, his mother used to chain him to the clothesline ... but Dick’s dad was president of Ottawa U, and so, by right, he just belonged.

  It wasn’t that Gary didn’t want to get into the swim. And it wasn’t his fault that by the time he got to the edge of the pond, he had the wit, the discernment, to see it was empty. ... It just happened that he wasn’t a jock, or easily social, so he had to find another way to get what he needed, to see himself whole.

  He was not going to make the football team, no ... but he made the tennis team. He was not going to play varsity basketball ... so he became the team manager. For a while, he went to games as announcer for Ottawa’s first and only radio station, KOFO (twelve-twenty on your dial ...). He was the only boy to apply for editor in chief of the student paper. So, Florence Robinson, the faculty adviser, asked the other teachers, and ... Gary was the chief. And then, too, he ran for class office: not yet for president; that was still the province of jocks, heroes ... but everybody knew Hartpence was smart, and serious, so they voted him vice president. (It wasn’t till his senior year he tried for president, and almost sailed in unopposed, until his friend Willie Hoobing filed on a whim, and Willie, who always small-talked everyone, took that prize away.)